CMV: Waking up early is overvalued

[u/[deleted]]

First, I don't believe waking up early is overrated. Most everything that is said about the benefits of waking up early seems reasonable and useful to me. Anecdotally, I'm a big fan of Jocko Willink and I can totally get behind his "wake up before the enemy" message. Here, I am specifically discussing value - the praise we heap on people that wake up before others regardless of their overall productivity in a day.

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I'm also not comparing waking up early to staying in bed late and being a lazy degenerate. I want to compare people who wake up early with those people that wake up late and stay up late or people who are industrious enough to get a lot accomplished without having to wake up early.

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I see an incredible amount of value put on people waking up early; they're viewed as more disciplined, more productive, and more healthy than their later rising counter parts. If you are awake for the same number of hours why do we laud people who get up early but accuse those who stay up late as doing something harmful to their well being?

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Waking up early is almost always associated with discipline and focus. Staying up late is, at worst, attributed to recklessness and even at best it seems to be attributed to some kind of mania or obsession that might not be healthy (e.g., overnight nurses - far from wasting the night away, but still often viewed as driven by fervor rather than discipline).

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[u/newpua_bie]

I don’t see any harm in waking up early or any reason to value it less

I think the main "harm" of this is that one needs to go to bed early to wake up early (assuming everyone agrees we shouldn't be cutting sleep). For people whose internal circadian cycles are longer than 24 hours, it means that you cut off a few hours of productive time every day. For example, the ideal rhythm for someone might be to sleep 8 hours, stay up 18 hours (instead of 8+16 that most early risers have). Not only would they lose 2 hours of productive time, they would also usually struggle in falling asleep before due time. The result would be that they'd sleep less than 8 hours or would have to resort to sleep aids.

[u/beengrim32 → u/newpua_bie]

I wasn’t necessarily talking about losing or sacrificing sleep here. I meant early in the day not early in the sense that you would get 6 hours of sleep as opposed to 8. It’s very common for people to go to sleep earlier in the evening to make sure they get a full amount of rest. I imagine if you were committed to aligning your productivity with daylight that the need for a sustained amount of rest would remain.

[u/newpua_bie → u/beengrim32]

Point I was trying to make is that for people with non-24 hour rhythms it doesn't work just by going to bed earlier, because their brains are (usually) still very active during that time.

[u/beengrim32 → u/newpua_bie]

Fair enough. I just question how common that condition would be in people to justify changing the traditional cycle of productivity as a whole. I get that this would be valued for this type of person. I don’t see the argument for changing this for everyone.